Evangeline Lilly Is a Woman We Love

When we asked Evangeline Lilly to be photographed for the magazine, she asked for a short story she could act out. A grand experiment was born: two stories, one factual, one fictional, and one unbelievable photo shoot.

You know how elves move? Like the one Evangeline Lilly plays in the recently released The Hobbit? More swiftly and elegantly than the rest of us, leaping and twisting and firing arrows into Orc eye sockets in the time it would take you to pour a glass of Scotch? That's kind of how she speaks. Machine-gun fast. Clauses stacking upon clauses, digressions looping back into some crystalline opinion. Talking about her blue-collar upbringing in Canada . . . talking about her love of writers like Tolkien and Gaiman and Gorey . . . talking about how she hopes the children's book she wrote will help kids face their own troubles and find courage.

The Squickerwonkers is the first installment of what she hopes will be eighteen volumes. Deliciously creepy, like something that crawled out of the brain of Guillermo del Toro, it's about an unruly girl named Selma who wanders into a carnival attraction full of grotesque marionettes.

She's been playing around with the story since she was a kid. "Back then, I lived in my head. My daydreams owned me," she says. "All of my friends were imaginary. The everyday world felt like such a distraction. Even getting called to dinner was an inconvenience." The ideal training for life as an actor.

Or a nerd with a George Carlinesque appreciation of language. Lilly says Comic-Con is home to "her people." She drops as many SAT words into a sentence as she does fucks. She once kicked the ass of a playground bully who was messing with a kid with cerebral palsy. She selects badass, complicated sci-fi and fantasy roles—Kate Austen on Lost, Tauriel in The Hobbit—that make her the imaginative offspring of Ripley and Xena.

"I don't want to shield kids from reality," she says. "I want to replicate their experience with characters they can hopefully relate to, ones that are flawed, lovable, troubled, courageous outcasts."

A flawed, lovable, troubled, courageous outcast—a lot like the character she plays right here.

The Apartment

By Benjamin Percy

Abbey Drucker for Esquire

The apartment does not belong to Nora, but she sleeps there and bathes there and eats there, so the three-bedroom two-thousand-square-foot penthouse with cork floors and sharp-edged furniture and a stainless-steel kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows might as well be hers. There is a fridge for wine she pretends to enjoy, a baby-grand piano she cannot play.

She used to work in a department store, running credit cards, folding designer jeans into squares. One day, in the dressing room, she found a purse. A camel-colored Hermès. She did not hesitate, not for a second, before throwing a pile of discarded clothes on top of it and hurrying away. She didn't feel bad when the woman—fifty-something, with a cloud of perfume following her around and a collarbone so sharp her body appeared hung on a hanger—came back asking if she had seen it.

Nora wasn't a criminal. She simply collected what others did not need.

She tossed away the credit cards, but tried on the lipstick and blew her nose with the tissues and gripped the ring of keys so tightly they bit blood from her palm. She waited until the skies grayed and the air had ice in it, because people like this always went away for the winter. To their second lives. She entered the building's foyer while pretending to talk on the phone and the doorman only smiled and said, "How are you doing today, ma'am?" and she said "Oh, fine" before stepping into the elevator.

She keyed her way into the apartment. It smelled faintly of lemons and leather. Up here, she was far away from the sounds of the city, but she could hear the distant wail of a siren.

With the windows surrounding her, she couldn't help but feel observed. At a Chinese restaurant she liked to go to, there was a salt-water tank full of bright-banded and feather-finned fish, one side facing the lobby, the other side the dining room. No matter which way the fish turned, someone was watching, pointing, smiling. When she stood by the windows, she thought of all the eyes that might find her, hundreds of eyes, thousands of eyes, all of them wondering who she was and how did she ever get so lucky to live in a place like this.

She didn't plan on spending the night, but then the sun sank and the snow swirled and the wind hummed against the windows and she decided one night—that's all—what's the harm? And now one night has become one week. The department store has called her cell three times, but she erases the voice mails without listening to them. It feels like they're for someone else.

Nora orders movies on demand, gets takeout delivered, opens and closes drawers, spends a lot of time studying a framed photo of the woman with her husband. She stands in such a way that her face is transposed upon the other's. The walls are busy with art. She is not fond of the splattered and smeared canvases. They are too messy for her. But there is a print in the bathroom she likes. A Degas reproduction. Ballerinas stretching before a performance, surrounded by mirrors.

Weeks pass. Then a month. She sleeps in the king-sized bed. She eats all the food in the fridge and freezer and cupboards. She wears the woman's clothes. She is especially fond of a white silk robe that makes her feel like the opposite of a shadow.

She brings a man home from a bar one night—just long enough for him to walk through the apartment and say, "Wow. You've got some life." Then, when he tries to kiss her, she slaps him and tells him to leave and loves how he listens even as he begs to stay.

Her mother liked to tell a story about Nora. When she was a girl, someone asked what she wanted to be when she grew up and Nora said "A mannequin." Her mother laughed and excused her and said she must have the wrong word. But Nora was insistent. No. A mannequin. A mannequin is what she meant. They always looked so perfect. And people who were otherwise in a hurry would pause to study them, imagining their bodies in their place.

And a part of her still feels that way. How people see you defines you, your outside determining your inside. The only true value is the perception of others. If they cherish you, covet you, then you earn the right to feel the same.

Then, late one night, the couple comes home. Nora hears the key scraping the lock and springs from where she lies. She barely has time to tidy the sheets before crawling beneath the bed. An hour later—after they putter about and unzip their luggage and clean up in the bathroom—they fall into bed, sighing their exhaustion.

Nora waits for their breathing to deepen and find a regular sawing rhythm. Then she slides from her hiding place. The shades are drawn, but the glow of the city soaks through and makes the air an underwater blue. She knows she should run, but she cannot stand to leave, not yet.

The king-sized mattress gives her plenty of room to slip between the sleeping figures. She tries to match her breathing with theirs. And when the husband rolls over and throws an arm around her and says, in a voice thick with sleep, "Love you," she runs her fingers through his hair and says, "You make me feel special."

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